Abstract

Mexican machismo and its vulgar folklore have long been of interest to students of Mexican culture. This article, based on research among a group of undocumented male workers, reexamines one aspect of this folklore - its degradation of women - and proposes that, besides legitimizing the oppression of women, it plays an ideological role in class conflict. The article argues that, as a signifying system unique to working-class male culture, the folklore of machismo symbolically conflates class and gender by shifting the point of conflict from the public domain of the former to the domestic domain of the latter.